Coraid Raises $50 Million From Investor Group Led by Crosslink
November 03, 2011, 11:39 AM EDTBy Xu Wang
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Coraid Inc., a maker of data-storage devices for businesses, raised $50 million from an investor group led by Crosslink Capital to expand its product engineering team and global operations.
Crosslink was joined by computer hard-drive maker Seagate Technology Plc and Kinetic Ventures LLC, Coraid said today in a statement. Early investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners also participated in the funding round.
Coraid uses Ethernet, a computer-networking technology, to connect storage, which it says is faster than traditional enterprise storage devices at a lower cost. The Redwood City, California-based company now has 1,500 customers in 45 countries, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Northrop Grumman Corp., a U.S. defense contractor.
“The storage sector is still dominated by older technologies developed in the mainframe era,” Kevin Brown, Coraid’s chief executive officer, said in an interview. “We see a demand for an alternative to the old storage model. And we are really benefiting from it.”
Coraid was founded in 2004 by Chief Technology Officer Brantley Coile, the inventor of a technology called PIX Firewall that was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc., according to Coraid’s website.
Coraid competes with storage-equipment makers led by EMC Corp., Dell Inc. and NetApp Inc. The company’s revenue has grown sixfold in the past two years and reached “double-digit millions” in 2011, Brown said.
The company said on Oct. 19 that it had acquired Yunteq Inc., which makes software that helps run cloud-computing systems. Coraid said the purchase would help it to meet demand for cloud computing, which lets companies run software stored on the Web instead of their own server computers.
--Editors: Jillian Ward, Donna Alvarado
To contact the reporter on this story: Xu Wang in New York at xwang206@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
